ORS host with less downtime?

Dear ORS community—

It’s wonderful the ORS team has developed this great service and they offer it for free. As a free service, I don’t feel I can expect 99.9% uptime. But for our purpose, we want more uptime than ORS currently delivers. Below is a list of downtimes over the last few months.

Is there a way we can get a higher-uptime version of ORS? Does anybody host it for a paid plan with a service level agreement (SLA)?

  • Sun 2025 Feb 2, 1:55am PT / 9:55 UTC — down for 40h 37m
  • Sun 2025 Jan 26, 5:48pm PT / Mon 27 Jan 2025 1:48 UTC— down for 43 minutes—scheduled maintenance
  • Thu 2025 Jan 23, 5:36am PT / 13:35 UTC — down for 1h 4m
  • Thu 2025 Jan 23, 6:28 am PT/ 14:28 UTC— down 46 min
  • Thu 2024 Oct 24, 12:03am PT/ 8:03 UTC — down 17h 44m
  • Tue 2024 June 11, 11:28am PT / 19:28 UTC — 48h 50m

—Winston

Hey Winston,

I am not aware of anyone hosting a paid plan with an SLA.
What exactly is “your purpose” where you would need more uptime than currently available?

We are of course aiming to provide higher uptimes ourselves, starting with more clearly announcing our downtimes and scheduled maintenances.

The downtime on Jan 23rd, for example, has been announced in the forum:

The most recent downtime on Feb 2nd was an unfortunate mistake, consequence of the maintenance on Jan 23rd. You can find more details in this post:

We are sorry for not clearly communicating the maintenance there and will continue to improve our communication strategies.

Best regards

Hi Jakob—

I hope I don’t sound ungrateful—we are very happy to have ORS at all. And you are very generous offering it for free for non-profit causes. But ideally we’d have something more like 99.9% uptime, and maybe redundant servers so scheduled maintenance can be done without taking the service down. I know that’s asking a lot for a free service, which is why I feel bad asking for it. But we’d be willing to pay some to support that.

Another idea, if other ORS users are in a similar situation, perhaps we could get together and form a team to maintain a backup system?

—Winston